North Carolina Tenants Union is building tenant power across the state by organizing apartment complexes, fighting rent increases, winning critical repairs, and helping tenants stop the privatization of public housing.

I spoke with Organizing Director Hailey Huget about how the organization adapted Action Builder for tenant organizing, similarities and differences between labor and tenant campaigns, and why tracking apartment units is just as important as tracking people when it comes to tenant organizing.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about the organization?

My name is Hailey Huget, and I’m the Organizing Director for the North Carolina Tenants Union. We are a statewide tenant union made up of local tenant unions in cities across North Carolina.

We’re focused on apartment complexes where folks share the same landlord and can be brought together to put pressure on that landlord to win things like critical repairs, stopping rent increases, and stopping the sale of buildings that were public housing to private developers. We also focus on policy campaigns that are oriented toward improving the rights of renters in North Carolina.

How did you find yourself in tenant organizing?

I’ve been in labor for a long time, and that was really how I made my way into organizing. I organized my workplace in DC, fell in love with it, and then realized, ‘I’m going to be a professional organizer.’ I’ve caught the bug.

We ended up moving down here [to North Carolina], and, for several years, I stayed working for a labor union, doing tech worker organizing. While I was doing tech organizing professionally, I was a volunteer involved in the local Winston-Salem tenant union, which is called Housing Justice Now.

I realized there are a lot of similarities between the craft of labor organizing and tenant organizing, and I just kind of fell in love with it and really fell in love with the organization of North Carolina Tenants Union.

Action Builder was originally designed for labor organizing. How have you adapted it for tenant organizing?

I used Action Builder in the labor context before coming to the tenant union. But in  tenant organizing, a person’s address is much more essential information about them. Not just a person’s address, but mapping out all of the units in a complex and their status is very important.

So one of the ways we’ve adapted the platform for our purposes is instead of just tracking people as an entity, we also have units as an entity that we’re tracking.

What does that look like in practice?

We’ll have canvassers go to a property, and they’ll knock on a door, and then when they get that kind of hollow ringing sound and no one appears to live there, they can mark the unit status in ActionBuilder as ‘vacant.’

Or, you knock on a door, someone opens it a crack, and they are like, ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ and then they shut it.

If you didn’t get their name, you can’t actually put them as a person in Action Builder, but you can put whatever their unit number is, marked ‘Do not knock’ or ‘Refused to speak.’

“One of our organizers credits Action Builder with helping us make our campaigns much more systematic.”

Why makes tracking units strategically important?

It’s really helpful to track vacancies in a complex to assess a landlord’s plans for the complex. 

If they’re letting a lot of units remain vacant for a long time and systematically not filling empty units, that can be a signal that they’re intending to sell the building or, if it’s public housing, it can be a signal of an intent to privatize.

What did tenant organizing look like before Action Builder?

Thousands of Google Sheets. Literally a nightmare. And you’re not just inputting them into a sheet, but the sheet that you’re using for that canvass might not speak to the other Google sheet you had for last month’s canvass or yesterday’s canvass. So just lots of de-duping and indexing and nightmarish situations that arise from the many out-of-date, duplicate Google Sheets.

It’s not really a method, it’s more of just chaos, like piles of paper on a table.

One of our organizers credits Action Builder with helping us make our campaigns much more systematic and with some recent successes that we’ve had with campaigns in Durham, where that person organizes.

“One other thing we’ve been able to make really good use of is the Action Network integration. It’s just been an incredible game changer, honestly, to have the platforms talk to each other.”

What advice would you give tenant organizations considering Action Builder?

I’d say don’t be afraid to lean on your support person to help you configure it. [Senior Partner Success Specialist] Jenn Diagostino was so helpful and really super, super creative.

I would just show her spreadsheets of the information that we would be capturing and she was like, ‘OK, I have a workaround.’

So just not being afraid to say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing now and what we need.’ There will be workarounds available.

One other thing we’ve been able to make really good use of is the Action Network integration. That has been extremely helpful for automating various processes that would have taken a lot of time before. 

It’s just been an incredible game changer, honestly, to have the platforms talk to each other.

How can people support the North Carolina Tenants Union?

If they’re a renter in North Carolina who wants to organize their own building, then they should go to the website and fill out our interest form, and we’ll reach out soon.

For folks who aren’t in North Carolina or who aren’t renting, the best way is to donate.

Tenant organizing is tricky, especially in our case. Most of the tenants that we organize with are in public housing or other forms of federally subsidized housing, and they are paying member dues to the organization. It’s wonderful, and it’s great that they are eager to pay dues, but also those amounts added up are not going to fully fund the organization in the way that labor union dues will fund staff positions [in a labor union]. So donating is really important.

Thank you to Hailey for taking the time to speak with us about your work and Action Builder!

You can read more about the North Carolina Tenants Union here. Click here to donate to support their work.You can learn more about Action Builder here, sign up for a live demo here, or email us at join@actionbuilder.org to get started using the tool.